Friday, January 10, 2014

Many never thought they’d see the day come, but
it finally has – China, one of the world’s largest importers of ivory, has
announced, that it, along with 29 other nations, will help protect the world’s
elephants by criminalizing poaching.Now, that’s
something to celebrate.

A Space For Giants newsletter
of December rejoices in the growing tide of goodwill and scale of responses to
the elephant/ivory story.

Three days ago I posted on a
small part of the ugly mess of the current ivory crisis (not the first) as this 1983 book title indicates.

For good reviews of this
very long-standing issue get hold of either this book by Ian Parker and the late Mohamend Amin or Ian Parker’s more
recent What I Tell You Three Times is
True. The latter is a really in-depth examination of the subject.

There has been a considerable
amount of social media traffic on many aspects of it. I have picked up some
thirty postings in the last month alone. Like the two I opened with about half
of them take a slightly different and hopefully more optimistic view of the
situation, many of them reporting seizures of ivory, either as raw tusks or
worked items. Others deal with criminal trials.

In South Africa, where rhino
poaching is a major concern, they are preparing for the elephant war with
publicity. This video is well
worth the watching. Indeed if you have time for nothing else do spend the ten
minutes with it.

Kenya also seems to be taking
things more seriously, not only with the new laws I mentioned in the blog of
Jan 7 but in catching offenders (again two reports.)

In that Jan 7 post I
mentioned that a new law, if signed by President
Uhuru Kenyatta, will make it possible to punish poachers with life
sentences. A remarkable public admission was made on Jan 3 by a former employee
of the Lewa Conservancy. Keleshi Parkusaa, 39, said he has
been a poacher even when he was employed there for three years. He obviously
admitted his crimes before the law comes into effect in order to avoid that
sentence.

Other countries that have
taken action are France where 3 tonnes of ivory are to be burned. This picture by Reuters/Keith
Bedford shows some of the items. Also Vietnam, where a court has sentenced a company
director and his deputy to 3 years in jail each for smuggling 158 pieces of
ivory tusks weighing more than 2.4 tons.

And the USA where a New York City antiques dealer who pleaded
guilty to conspiracy for smuggling artifacts made from rhinoceros horns from
the U.S. to China and Hong Kong has been sentenced to three years in prison,
plus three years’ supervised release.

The key, as everyone realizes,
is China.

Basket ball star Yao Ming has
been actively campaigning about conservation issues for quite some time and his
efforts to publicize the shark’s fin soup issue has yielded encouraging results. He has been similarly active
on the ivory front and his and other peoples efforts may be changing the way
that folks in China think about these issues.

This anti-elephant poaching story filed from Kenya and Mozambique by Yuan Duanduan
titled The Blood Ivory:
Behind the Largest Ivory Smuggling Cases in China has gone viral.

In
it he wrote

China has become the
largest illegal ivory consumer market in the world, but 2 /3 of the Chinese
people do not know ivory is obtained through killing the elephant.The ivory trade has
become a source of capital for African terrorist groups, forming a tight
secretive network of poachers, small and big middlemen.In recent news on November 5, 2013, Xiamen
Customs announced the largest ivory smuggling cases uncovered in recent years,
two cases of which ivory added up to 11.88 tons, worth 603 million yuan. If it
hadn’t been seized, the ivory from Africa would have infiltrated China ‘s
secretive “black market”, to be eventually sold into private collections.

As of Dec 20 the story had
over 10 million Tweets and Retweets on Weibo (China’s
Twitter/Facebook hybrid)

"The
article was reposted on 24 online discussion forums or Bulletin Board Systems
(BBS) including Mop and Tianya, two of the most popular in China. Thousands of
comments were generated on the Tianya BBS forum alone. Overall over 5,000
comments on the article were posted on Weibo, BBS fora, and other
websites."

A
very clever ploy was to merge the image of China’s iconic panda with the shape
of an elephant. This poster, courtesy of
WildAid reads: Protect the pandas of Africa - elephants. When the buying
stops the killing can too.

I fear that only very
cautious optimism should be felt. One of the several concerned groups Elephant Advocacy had these thoughts about the
ivory crush.

While it's
encouraging to see China, the world's key consumer of ivory, taking such a
step, there would be even more grounds for celebration if it didn't attempt to
isolate 'illegal' ivory as the problem while actively promoting a deeply flawed
parallel trade in 'legal' ivory which serves to confuse consumers, boost demand
and provide a laundering mechanism for illegal ivory. It's difficult, too, to
see beyond today's event as a PR exercise when considering that the 6.2 tonnes
of ivory crushed represents a small fraction of what we know has been seized in
China.

The future?

One of the problems is that
nobody really knows the real number s of elephants in Africa. CITES reports probably give the most
reliable figures, but even they are inevitably fraught with estimates and
inaccuracies. The news that Paul Allen,
the Microsoft billionaire has
announced that he will fund a pan-African survey is a huge step in the right direction. The will aim to calculate how many actually remain, where they are found, what threats
they face and whether their total population numbers are in fact increasing or
decreasing.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Anyone who follows Facebook,
Linkedin or Twitter links that cover wildlife issues cannot fail to have seen
the remarkable number of posts since December 1st about the utter
disaster that is going on across all African states where elephants are found.
Indeed, in some cases one can probably write where elephants used to roam. What a mess!

The news has gone well
beyond the social media scene and this scanned-in report in the Guardian, that I picked up in UK last week, may
have brought it to the attention of many others.Sadly that is very unlikely to make a jot of
difference to those who are engaged in the slaughter elephants and the use of
their teeth for human pleasure.

A really authoritative 19-page report by a team from three
main conservation groups (CITES Secretariat, IUCN / SSC African Elephant
Specialist Group and TRAFFIC International sums it up nicely.

It is titled: Status of African elephant populations and
levels of illegal killing and the illegal trade in ivory.

The report deals with the 2012 situation and a few
years prior.A key sentence in the
executive summary tells the sorry tale of the why?

"Poverty and weak
governance in elephant range States, together with demand for illegal ivory in
consuming nations, are the three key factors identified by repeated MIKE
analyses, including this one, as being most strongly associated with observed
poaching trends."

Of the many reports in
December 2013 that fit this picture I suppose the ones out of Tanzania are as
good an example as any. The Prime Minister Jakaya
Kikwete sacked four of his cabinet for what was reported as overzealous use
of control measures in the so-called Operation Tokomeza.

Within two days the operation was restarted after a
container load of ivory reputedly destined for China was seized at the Dar
es Salaam port.

It may be that
the situation in Tanzania is the worst in Africa. A posting by Richard Conniff
of Dec 18 is titled Elephant Poaching: The Disaster
in Tanzania says a lot.

Conniff’s post is either
terrifying or beggars belief. He states that “Apparently, managing the media
means keeping these results as quiet as possible.” So he quotes from none other than the
National Geographicabout the number of elephants in the Selous Game reserve alone. The latest, recently announced population
estimate is 13,084. This indicates an unprecedented decline of nearly 80
percent over the last six years. For the mathematically disinclined that is
a drop from 55,000 since 2007.

The numbers of elephants poached throughout Africa in
2012 are telling enough. The report, which is based on sound studies, gives an
estimate of some 15,000 animals but acknowledges that:

Monitoring of
elephant populations, apart from at a few well-monitored sites, is sporadic and
inconsistent. The low precision of most estimates makes it difficult to detect
any immediate repercussion on elephant numbers in the short-term but this does
not mean there are no changes.

That is just 2012. There are
no properly monitored figures for 2013, but none of the many claims gives a
figure lower than 25K. The most dire claim comes from the International Fund for Animals Welfare who suggest that up to
“50,000 elephants a year are now being slaughtered.” In this post on Dec 20
they stated that more than 41 tonnes of
elephant ivory have been seized in 2013, the largest quantity in 25 years.

Whether the
situation has really “shocked world
leaders out of their ennui and into action to halt poaching and ivory trafficking”
is real or hoped for is more questionable.

Other postings mention
numbers like 25 or 30,000 but all these numbers exceed any possible replacement
numbers and all are horrific. Of course the use of cyanide at salt licks is nasty,
but the wholesale mowing down of the sentient, intelligent creatures with
automatic weapons is probably nastier. In the cyanide case, the affected
animals will have died quickly and probably known little of what was happening
to their herd mates. With a hail of bullets smashing into bone, lungs, hearts
and brains many of the elephants will have been very well aware of what was
happening.

Having written this last
paragraph from the heart I am horrified to think that I could opine that
cyanide was a better way to die than by gunfire.

The Kenya
government seems to have lifted themselves off their collective backsides and
taken action. If the newWildlife Conservation and Management
Bill 2013 is signed into law by the president a life sentenced may be handed
down for anyone convicted of rhino or elephant poaching.

At the other end of the trade
chain a Dec 22 post from the South China
Morning Post makes it clear that the Chinese do not seem to share the
opinion of the Kenyans.

Wildlife conservationists slammed a
four-month jail term and fines of up to HK$80,000 for five ivory smugglers
from the mainland as “too lenient”, saying it will do little to stop the
illicit trade. (HK $= 0.13 US$).

“It is way too lenient because Chinese people
buying illicit ivory in Africa know that if they are caught, at most they
will just lose the ivory and get a puny fine,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director for the
International Fund for Animal Welfare.“Tom Milliken, of
the wildlife group TRAFFIC, said while he welcomed the jail term as a
deterrent, fines could be written off as “the price of doing business”.”

He is probably right. Another
post of Dec 22, this one by Simon Parrytells us that the price of ivory in Hong Kong has
risen 50-fold in the last 10 years. Not surprisingly big tusks sell at a
premium. Parry gives an example of a 65kg pair of mounted tusks is on sale for
HK$15 million [almost US $ 2 million] at Chinese Arts and Crafts in Wan
Chai.

As described in this post of
Dec 13 by Emily Matchar what the
rest of the world knows as illegal
ivory is called white goldin Hong Kong. With an increasingly wealthy Chinese middle class seeking
status symbols does the elephant have a chance?Then of course there are the 270 odd Chinese billionaires (that
is not a typo; It is B, not M).

I could go on, as I have only
mentioned a small proportion of the December posts, but this one should give
some flavour to those who have not been following the situation closely. Anyway,
I have just gone over my one thousand word limit.

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Jerry Haigh

About Me

My career as a wildlife veterinarian and storyteller has taken me to many countries for work on a wide range of species. I enjoy relating stories about the wild animal work, which range from having soldier ants up my shorts and pregnancy checking a lion to giving an enema to a rhino and encounters with a shaman from the Tsaatan reindeer herders in the mountains of Mongolia. I enjoy weaving African and other folktales into accounts of my own experiences with animals.
In Africa I have worked in Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Cameroon. In North America I have worked on species as diverse as polar bears, wood bison, seals, wolves, moose and elk. For thirty years I have worked on a wide variety of deer species on four continents.
If you entered this blog directly you might like to take a look at pictures and extracts of my three books "Wrestling With Rhinos", "The Trouble With Lions" and "Of Moose and Men" that you can find on my web site at www.jerryhaigh.com